Page 54 - GALIET HEAVEN´S SCROLL IV

For countless epics and tragedies bear witness to our inner chasm, our loss of a golden age, our exile from the Word-Spirit, and from the bliss of paradise, an exile writing itself eternally, scribbling away its infinite and finite pages in the prisons, dungeons, stadiums and lion’s dens of history. Each century smears the Divine Word with iniquity’s blood, wherever tears might fall, upon the heavenly Scroll, or upon the little books of the dim hours, written from our Ex-Pontus of grief,
“Little book, you will go without me — and I grudge it not — to the city, whither alas your master is not allowed to go! Go, but go unadorned, as becomes the book of an exile; in your misfortune wear the garb that befits these days of mine. You shall have no cover dyed with the juice of purple berries — no fit colour is that for mourning; your title shall not be tinged with vermilion nor your paper with oil of cedar; and you shall wear no white bosses upon your dark edges...Go my book, and in my name greet the loved place: I will tread them at least with what foot I may. If, as is natural In so great a throng, there shall be any there who still remembers me, any who may perchance ask how I fare, you are to say that I live, yet not in health and happiness; that even the fact of life I hold to be the gift of a god.”
Ovid, Tristia54 I-i.1-46.
54 Ovid. Tristia and Ex Ponto. Trans. By Arthur Leslie Wheeler. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library,1996. 5-6.
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